Chapter 31
Thirty-One
Mark
I call Sedge after I slide back into the car, and Jago starts maneuvering us north.
“Can we freeze the rest of my day?” I ask. “I’m taking a little field trip upstate, and I might not be able to take any last-minute calls.”
“Of course, sir.” A tactful pause. “I’m sure Dinah will be able to handle a club emergency, but it would help to know how available you’ll be if anything comes up?”
“I’ll be…Albany amounts of available.”
“Albany.” Dryly.
“Yes, it’s for a personal project of mine. I should be back in Manhattan by evening, and then Isolde and I will return tomorrow.”
“From your personal project in Albany. Yes, sir.” It’s spoken in the sober tone of an assistant taking notes, but Sedge is talented in the art of implying a reaction he’s not evidentially giving. In this case, a reaction of complete disbelief.
“Will you do me a favor, Sedge? Will you let Andrea know I’ll be back tomorrow, but Goran and Nat will be out for a while longer?”
“Are they going to Albany too, sir?”
“No, no, nothing like that.” But I don’t clarify any further. I haven’t told anyone aside from Tristan about Cara Sims…and therefore, I haven’t told anyone where Goran and Nat have gone. It seems easier to keep everything contained until we know more about what Cara’s future looks like.
“Yes, sir,” says Sedge when it becomes clear that I have nothing I’m willing to add. “Have a safe journey.”
“I’ve got Jago with me,” I say, catching my driver’s eye in the rearview mirror. “No one will dare touch me while I’ve got a giant, brooding Cornishman by my side.”
Jago just shakes his head and looks back at the road.
But he’s smiling. He likes me, I know he does, because he once saved my foot from getting run over by a supply truck during a joint CIA and Royal Marines operation in Armenia.
(With Jago, such a thing is essentially a proposal of marriage.) I poached him from the bootnecks the moment he was free, and he’s been silently squiring me around ever since.
I say goodbye to Sedge and then raise the barrier between me and Jago and attempt to return Lox’s call.
She sends me straight to voicemail, which is the most Lox outcome I can think of, and then I occupy myself by pulling up the address of Regina Springer’s auto shop and examining the outside, the nearby buildings, the layout of the streets.
The city starts to breathe around us, the buildings getting lower, the trees pressing harder against the road.
Soon we’re moving at speed, and I lift my eyes from my phone to watch the trees fly by, stark and skeletal, wetly reaching up for the gray clouds.
I think of Morois in winter, of the sodden leaves and stubborn moss, the snowdrops and hawthorn that defy the cold and the axial tilt of the earth to bloom anyway.
I think of Tristan gathering wood in the snow, of Isolde’s collarbone gilded by the light of the fire.
I once stepped into Isolde’s dojo curious about the girl who seemed like such a convenient answer to all my problems—as leverage against Cashel, as a potential asset who could be flipped, and in those early, dark days, as a vessel for retribution, a treasured body to pay Cashel back for the treasured body he once gave me in a dark alley.
But I left that day with something more than curiosity, something deeper.
The more I watched her, the more fascinated I became.
They took her for gold when she was titanium; they admired her polish when she was nothing but swirling smoke underneath it all.
And the first time she crawled to me, bowled over by a few seconds on her hands and knees, I considered that my plans would have to change.
I hired Tristan already knowing of him, of his heroism, his haunted beauty, his provocative hands.
I invited him to apply for the job not because he was going to be Blanche’s stepson but because I already knew I could count on him to do the right thing even when it was hard, because I knew that he could protect Isolde—even from me if necessary.
Because I’d read the interview years before when a reporter asked why he was single, and he said it was because he was ready to fall in love at a moment’s notice. He said it like it was a liability, and oh, Tristan, puppy, you were right. It’s such a liability.
If only I hadn’t been liable as well.
The phone rings as we’re getting off the highway—Albany is hunched and grim under a depressing sky—and I see Lox’s name on the screen.
“My dear hacker,” I say. “Any news for me today?”
“No? Yes? I don’t know. We finished building the Revelata Scientia translation from the scans online and found our old friends in there, mentioned as a group of princes undertaking the study of alchemy.”
“Ys?”
“The same.”
“So that’s why Minch had it in his Bible.”
“That’s what we thought too, but also he was very specific about it being the version at that library, right? So we converted the images you sent into text and compared the text to the other versions we’d collected, just to see if there was anything different about Minch’s edition than the rest.”
“And there was?”
“There was. Because in Minch’s edition, there’s no mention of Ys at all or of a secret group of princes. Only the study of alchemy among nobility.”
I toy with the inside of my ring, considering this. “Why index a book that doesn’t mention Ys?”
“I don’t know, but Nimue connected me to the owner of Thornchapel, who let me look at the original scans of the book he has there, A Treatise of Politicks Large and Small .
The scans in their online archive have a sentence about Ys after discussing the Hanseatic League, but their original scans don’t.
I’ve got someone hunting through metadata to see if they can figure out when the deviation for this one occurred and possibly who introduced it while I hunt down the rest of the originals on the list.”
Jago rolls us to a stop in front of the auto shop. I tap my thumb once against my ring and then unbuckle my seat belt.
“Thank you for telling me,” I say as Jago opens my door. “And keep me updated on whatever else you find. I’m visiting Regina Springer today, and I’ll let you know what I find here, if anything.”
“An ephemeral money trail leading to a garage in Albany? You’re saying you don’t have much hope that’s going to be worth your time?”
“Have fun with the old books, Lox,” I say with good cheer and then hang up. Jago comes to stand next to me, looking up at the broken plastic sign mounted to the front of the garage. The windows at the front look like they’ve never been cleaned.
I scan the area—there’s a church across the street, strikingly Gothic but also undeniably abandoned, some shabby houses clad in rotting clapboard with air-conditioning units tilting precariously from upper windows, and plenty of empty brick buildings with temporary fencing along the outside.
“I’m looking for someone, and I don’t want to scare her off if she’s easily rattled,” I tell Jago, going over to the cloudy, yellow window of the shop’s lobby and trying to peer inside. No lights. The old TV set mounted to the wall is dark. “Do you mind finding a discreet place to wait for me?”
Jago makes sure to give the derelict street a pointed look before nodding with the expression of someone who thinks their boss is a dumbass.
“You worry too much. And I’ll call when I need you!” I add, waving him off and then trying the shop door. It opens, sleigh bells attached to the back jangling as it does, and I step onto the chipping linoleum.
A wiry man with warm beige skin and gray hair emerges from a far doorway, wiping grease off his hands with a bandana possibly older than I am. “Can I help you?” he asks, the words friendly even if he couldn’t look more surprised that someone is standing inside the shop.
“I was hoping to speak with Regina Springer,” I say. “About an old friend.”
A frown pulls at the deep grooves running from his nose to his mouth and etches horizontal lines across his forehead. “Regina died last week. The funeral was just two days ago. I’m sorry, I thought everyone knew.” He doesn’t sound accusatory, only awkward and maybe a little mournful.
I don’t have to fake my unhappiness about this news. “That’s tragic. I’m so sorry.” I ask the next part in the delicate tones of a respectful acquaintance. “Was it the cancer?”
A shoulder lifts under the well-worn shop uniform. “Partly, they say. She was doing more chemotherapy, but then she got the flu. It was slow at first, then fast. She wasn’t awake for the worst of it, which was a blessing.”
I nod, face solemn. “It sounds like it was.”
I’m already thinking through next steps—if I should try to filter through the shop records, if her house has been packed yet—when the mechanic says, “If you’re still needing to ask about your friend, Regina’s sister is probably at home.
Just across the street, in the old rectory.
” He gestures with the bandana through the window, and I look out, seeing the red brick house on the far side of the abandoned church.
“I think I might pay her a visit, actually. Let her know how sorry I am to hear about Regina. Thank you so much.”
He nods. “It’s sad stuff. Everyone around here liked Regina, but she and her sister kept to themselves. Almost no one at the funeral. Not a good way to end.”
No, it’s not. But there are very few good ways to end a life, and even a good end isn’t always an easy one.
I thank him again and leave, the sleigh bells rattling as the door slams shut behind me.
I cross the street and crunch across a gravel path through the graveyard to the rectory, head ducked against the piercing wind.
Weariness seeks the corners and edges of me as I stoop down to swipe a fresh-looking bouquet from a grave, a prop to shore up my pretense as a visitor offering condolences.
Fuck, I’m tired. And I don’t want to be cold or carrying stolen remembrances, I don’t want to be chasing leads.
I don’t want to be seeking answers only barely related to the questions I’m asking.
I want to be in bed, wrapped around Tristan while Isolde curls against me from behind.
I want to be at Morois playing chess with the set Isolde gave me as a wedding gift, genuinely concerned about losing to her while Tristan lies in front of the fire and reads.
I want the rest of my life to be worshipping the very two hearts I once planned to blight and then destroy, and I want it enough right now that I almost consider turning back, calling Jago to pick me up.
This was always going to be a dead end, even before I found out that Regina Springer was literally dead.
But I am my mother’s child, my grandad’s grandson, and the same part of me that refused to give up during one of our long outdoor games of hide-and-seek, even after the rain started or the dark came, can’t actually fathom dropping the stolen flowers and going home.
If it’s a dead end, I’m going to see its tomb with my own eyes.
I get to the rectory door and knock twice.
The same creep of decay that hung over the auto shop is present here too: dry weeds feathering around a statue of the Virgin Mary, crumbling mortar between the bricks, a dead tree limb on the roof.
But I do see curtains hung neatly inside and, through the curtains, a wedge of tidy kitchen.
And at one point, the flowerpot by the door must have held flowers.
Two sisters living alone, pulled under by the slow tide of cancer and age.
No one comes to the door. I knock again and watch the windows for movement, for shifts in light or reflection, and see nothing. I glance around to make sure only the trees and tombstones can bear witness and then check under the flowerpot for a key. There isn’t one.
I don’t have anything to pick a lock with—at least, nothing I’m willing to use—and breaking an old woman’s window really is in bad taste, even if I want to rifle through her dead sister’s things.
I’m about to walk around to check on a potential back door when I notice the path of worn grass leading from the rectory to the church itself, to a narrow door set into the back of the stone nave. It’s cracked, just slightly.
I keep the flowers in my hand as I stride through the graveyard to the door, planning on keeping my story simple enough to elaborate on if needed but specific enough that I can prompt Regina’s sister for some clues about why Regina might have been receiving money from a cardinal.
I push the door open—it’s shockingly heavy—and step into a cavernous space of dark stone and stained glass.
The windows are intact in their pointed arches, and the heavy wooden pews remain, but the altar is gone and the air is damp and lonely.
There is half-collapsed scaffolding in one corner, a pile of abandoned organ pipes in front of the dais, and amidst the rafters, I am almost certain I see an altocumulus of leathery shadows—bats.
The massive hammer beams supporting the roof are carved into the shape of angels.
They stare down with sightless eyes, their mouths rounded as if in song.
I see her immediately, a silver-haired woman perhaps in her late sixties, sitting in the second pew and smoking a cigarette.
She’s wearing an old leather coat and boots that show their age, and the cold has daubed her pale cheeks with red.
She glances over at me with flat gray eyes, the wrinkles on her lips deepening as she brings her cigarette to her lips.
It’s a strange fact of being what we are that we killers can recognize each other in the wild. I have never met or seen this woman before in my life, but I know we are the same. It’s something in her eyes maybe—or maybe it’s what isn’t there. Kindness or humanity or remorse.
She blows out a wreath of smoke as I walk up to her pew and sit down. She ashes her cigarette onto the floor with an impatient tap and says, “Look me in the eye when you do it. That’s all I ask.”